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February 27, 2008UCLA Launches Network to Study Health Care Disparities Affecting Minorities |
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From EurekAlert! - Breaking News: The UCLA Department of Family Medicine, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, has launched the Network for Multicultural Research on Health and Healthcare, a group that will study health care disparities affecting minorities with chronic diseases. The new group --- to be directed by Dr. Michael Rodríguez, associate professor of family medicine, and William Vega, professor of family medicine, both of the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA --- will draw on the talents of distinguished faculty from several national universities. "Research has shown us that disparities in health care do exist for certain racial and ethnic groups in the United States," Rodríguez said. Understand how social, ethnic, linguistic and economic factors affect the way health care providers serve minority populations. Study how personal, cultural and social factors promote or impede adequate health care and disease management. Explore how various factors --- including sources of health information, diet and exercise, self-management of chronic conditions, and levels of health literacy among patients and their families --- influence minorities' health status. The network's senior investigators are Dr. José J. Escarce, Dr. Carol Mangione, Dr. Leo S. Morales and Ninez Ponce of UCLA; Margarita Alegría of Harvard University; Dr. Bonnie Duran of the University of Washington; Kyriakos Markides of the University of Texas Medical Branch at Galveston; Dr. Eliseo Pérez-Stable of the University of California, San Francisco; and Roberto Suro of the University of Southern California. Understanding how variations in cultural factors such as immigration status, language ability, generational status and acculturation may impact the health and health care experiences of various immigrant groups is an important step toward those solutions.
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